In a win for environmentalists, the U.S. Interior Department says it is willing to withdraw sensitive wetlands from a large area in Alaska’s western Arctic region that it wanted to open next week to oil and natural gas drilling.
The U.S. District Court of Alaska earlier this month blocked the department’s plan to allow energy development […]

Scientists working in Ethiopia have discovered skeleton of a three- year-old girl who lived 3.3 million years ago, that is 150,000 years before Lucy in Dikika area, North Eastern Ethiopia, Dr. Zeresenay Alemseged of the Max Plank Institute in Leipzig, Germany, said.
While officially declaring the discovery here yesterday, Dikika Research Project Paleoanthropolgical Research Team Leader, […]

A mining company that sought to send a pipeline through an ancient sand dune won’t appeal a ruling upholding Michigan’s sand dune protection law, signaling an end to six years of controversy.
Full Story: Alliance for the Great Lakes.
(thanks Jennifer!)
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Rep. Robert Ney (R-Ohio) agreed today to plead guilty to conspiring to commit multiple official acts for lobbyists in exchange for campaign contributions, meals and luxury travel, sports tickets and gambling chips. He became the first elected official to face charges in the ongoing influence-peddling investigation of former lobbying powerhouse Jack Abramoff.
Full Story: Washinton Post.
He […]

The founder of Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia written by its users, has defied the Chinese government by refusing to bow to censorship of politically sensitive entries.
Jimmy Wales, one of the 100 most influential people in the world according to Time magazine, challenged other internet companies, including Google, to justify their claim that they could do […]

Things Are Good is another new good news blog.
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Ambien is being used to treat persistent vegetative state patients:

“Something strange and wonderful is happening here, and we have to get to the bottom of it,” he says. “Since Louis, I have treated more than 150 brain-damaged patients with zolpidem and have seen improvements in about 60% of them. It’s remarkable.”
Full Story: Guardian.
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I’m a week late with this one, sorry:
These strategies by labor don’t often get a lot of play in the mainstream media, but on this Labor Day, I thought it was a good time to celebrate the sophistication and persistence of US workers and their labor leaders in taking on the challenges of the […]

Producing iron by electrolysis rather than conventional smelting could prevent the emission of a billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year.
So concludes Donald Sadoway, a materials scientist at MIT in the US who has developed a way producing iron by electrolysing a molten iron oxide in the lab. If the process can […]

The part of the brain responsible for the way we understand words, meanings and concepts has been revealed as the anterior temporal lobe – a region just in front of the ears.
In a novel experiment, neuroscientists pinpointed the exact region of the brain that is responsible for encoding semantic memory, which is disrupted in certain […]